Fiona Barton's The Widow: Unleashing the beast within

Fiona Barton's The Widow comes highly rated and now that I've spent every waking hour since 6pm yesterday reading it, I can tell you it's entirely justified.

In the unholy tradition of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, Paula Hawkins's The Girl on a Train, and Jessica Knoll's Luckiest Girl Alive, this too is all about the monsters within. When marriages become murderous, who is the real monster? The one who errs or the one who enables? And isn't the real crime what we do to each other? Pretend to be who we are not? Barter our souls for companionship because society wants it so? Tolerate each other just because we don't want to be alone?

So who is the victim in Gone Girl? The "Cool Girl" or her "Once Cool Man"?

So who is the murderer in The Girl on a Train? The woman who has let herself go, who is not the girl she used to be, who has damaged herself because of low self-esteem? Or the husband who activiely encouraged it?

So who is the unluckiest person in Luckiest Girl Alive? The girl who has spent her whole life trying the land the preppy "New York Man"? Or the New York Man who has no clue who she was before she was reconstructed? Reinvention. Reconstruction. Reimagined.

Who we are to ourselves and to each other.

What terrible things we do in the name of love.

What demons we deal with.

If you want more of such deliciously thrilling questions even as you sit on the edge of the seat waiting for the inevitable, the horrible, the terrible to happen, well then The Widow is just for you.

Is Jean the meek hairdresser as innocent as she seems?

Is Glen her one-time banker husband as monstrous as he is?

Clearly in the new feminist noir the men are just not worthy of their women. It's just a matter of time that they will fail them. No matter how much the women try to reshape, redo, rescrape themselves, they can never be enough.

And much as in the case of Aarushi Talwar, there is no such thing as a private life when murder happens. Everything is fair game. All your secrets come tumbling out and the media plays an active part in holding up every scrap of information to the world for scrutiny, it's not right or wrong.

It just is.

Just like marriage.

It's not perfect.

But it has to be endured.

Dark, dank and dangerous view of human nature?

Perhaps, but what a thrill to unleash our inner beast.